


loverly

by wildcard_47



Category: My Fair Lady (1964)
Genre: All I Want Is An OTP, F/M, Full of Pompous Bombasity, No Disrespect to Lerner & Loewe, Oh Wouldn't It Be Sexy, Pre-Sexytimes, Verbal Sparring, Who Curses Secretly, You Are Cordially Invited To A Seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 06:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20773856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildcard_47/pseuds/wildcard_47
Summary: Eliza returns to 27A Wimpole Street, but she does not, in point of fact, fetch anyone's slippers.





	loverly

_ “Where the devil are my slippers?”  _

Henry tipped his hat over his face in order to avoid seeing Eliza’s reaction to this query, and so his surprise did not show when the lady answered, “How the devil should I know?”

Miffed, he folded both arms over his chest before he realised he ought not show how annoyed her answer had made him. Slowly, as if he had merely been switching to a more comfortable reclining position, he removed both hands to the chair arms. “Well. I suppose you may fetch them, wherever they are.”

“No.” He heard, rather than saw, the soft huff of a laugh which followed this word, and imagined the determined arch of one perfect brow as she regarded him. “It has been a long day, and I am rather tired.” More brightly. “I believe I shall have a nap.”

“A nap?” Henry yanked his hat from his face, already scowling, and sat up. What the devil was Eliza on about now? “A  _ nap?!  _ You insane creature. What on earth could possibly possess you to—?”

She was already sweeping from the room; in fact, she had not even deigned to listen to the rest of his sentence! Voicing an irascible growl, Henry followed, dogging at her heels like one of Pickering’s eternally-annoying canine companions.

“Now see here, you abominable madwoman! A real lady does not simply  _ have a nap  _ in the middle of the afternoon, or whenever she damn well pleases!”

“Whyever not?” asked Eliza, briefly pausing at the first-floor landing with one delicate hand poised on the banister rail. “Does she not possess the time?”

“Whyever—it  _ amazes me  _ how quickly a woman moves from grateful to guileless! How quickly her heart turns first to—!”

“Rest?” Eliza met his gaze squarely, only to reach up and toss her hat straight down onto the ground. It floated over the back of the sofa and disappeared. “One wonders how a man who keeps such long hours should discount the importance of a good night’s sleep.”

“Discount? Dis_count?!_”

Eliza was already climbing the next set of stairs, her heels tapping briskly on the mahogany. “That is the word I used, yes.”

“I count nothing of the kind,” Henry insisted as he followed her down the corridor, lingering in the doorway of her bedroom as she deposited her handbag onto a night table. “And furthermore, I despise your redoubtable attempts to undermine and bedevil me, mere seconds after returning home!”

Eliza gave him a funny soft look. “Oh, I do like the sound of that.”

“The statement or the bedeviling?”

“Both,” said Eliza, as she gathered several articles in one arm. It was at this point Henry realized she was going somewhere else.

“What are you doing now?” He glanced around the room, unable to tell how or why it had been altered in so short a time. “Where are you going?”

“Never you mind,” said Eliza, and brushed past him as swiftly as a gladiator whose ringside enemy was revealed to be a wheel of cheese instead of a bloodthirsty lion. “You may keep talking if you like.”

“If I  _ like? _ You obstreperous woman! I would  _ like _ ,” Henry intoned as he followed her, voice rising, “for there to be some semblance of sanity in this household _ ,  _ as I am neither a brutish man nor an unthinking animal. Am I to understand that one week outside my esteemed company has corrupted you so thoroughly? Am I to spend the entirety of a perfectly placid afternoon explicating—wh— _ what the devil are you doing now, you exasperating wench? _ ”

“Changing.” 

Here, Eliza smiled as brightly as she had at the Royal Ascot, depositing several feminine articles directly onto Henry’s bureau: a gold-handled brush; a small porcelain dish, and a bulbous perfume bottle made of pink glass.

Henry’s mouth fell open. “Ch—you— _ impudent _ guttersnipe! See how she scatters her ridiculous things across every blessed surface a man still calls his own! See how she  _ TOYS  _ with his defenses through such sinister annexations of his space!”

“Is there a point to this particular lesson?” Eliza asked, now examining her reflection in the bureau mirror. Slight, deft fingers wove through her hair, producing silver pin after silver pin, which she promptly deposited into the porcelain dish. “Or are you still angry over the idea of an afternoon nap?”

“Angry?  _ Angry?!  _ Why, I’ve never been so thoughtlessly insulted in all my life; I am not some blockheaded blackguard from the West Country, you unmitigated HUSSY. I am a man of learning who cannot be roused to anger through any ridiculous ideas of sloth you may currently possess.” He harrumphed to emphasize the point. “Sleeping away the afternoon. Wasting a perfectly good opportunity for learning by  _ lounging  _ all alone. Despicable.”

“Mm,” said Eliza, as an entire mass of curls tumbled down around her shoulders. Henry’s stomach constricted in a new and rather troubling way at the sight as she picked up her brush. “A man of your good character must always oppose any laziness.”

“Yes.” He watched, spellbound, as she brushed out a couple of large curls into soft, inviting waves. “Self-indulgent, hedonistic drivel. And I shan’t have any part of it.”

“Of course.” Putting down her brush, Eliza rounded the bed—his bed!—and took up a dark quilted garment from where it was folded neatly on his pillow. Henry stared unblinking as she opened it fully, laid it out across the comforter, and promptly stepped backwards.

“That’s…my dressing gown.”

“Quite an observation from a man of your great intellect.” Off came the pink silk drape from around her neck, snapping like a charioteer’s whip. The very sound made Henry flinch. “Is that a question, or were you merely pointing it out to me?”

“Nnh—” his tongue would not cooperate. “Well, you—you can’t have it.”

“Whyever not?”

Eliza’s fingers toyed at the nape of her neck, fussing with the buttons on her high collar. Henry could not look at her, and so he spun on his heel, hoping the act of walking should spur him into full alertness once more.

“Because it is  _ mine _ , you insufferable Circe! Has such unyielding insistence on laziness liquified our endless hours of academic work? Has your little flight away from—?”

“Well, if you won’t lend it to me, I suppose I shall have to sleep in my underthings.”

“Sl—” the noise that tore from his throat was inarticulate, furious. A shiver flew through his limbs; he did not speak till it was past, and made a great show of studying the pictures by the bureau in the meantime. “You wouldn’t  _ dare _ .”

“Of course I would,” returned Eliza, as merrily as if he had given her the greatest compliment in the world. “According to you, I was born the lowest of the low, and spent the majority of my life as the most wretched creature ever to walk the earth. Do you believe that sort of wretch cares one whit about proper nightgowns?”

“Well, I—you make me sound damned beastly,” Henry complained, and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m a gentle, amiable man.”

“Yeah,  _ all right. _ ”

For a moment, her laugh and her voice were not of the light bell-ring chime they had worked so hard to perfect, but the nasal, raucous shout he remembered vividly from the gutter. He did not reflect on how this laugh felt in his stomach and his ears; it was irrelevant, it was not logical, he did not care about such feelings one whit, by George!

“Well, I am!” he insisted, louder this time.

No laugh followed; he glanced toward Eliza for the first time in three minutes and registered an astonishing sight: now clad in his dressing gown with the loose garment open to the winds, she was currently balanced on one foot, with the other braced against the bed frame. Bent at the waist, she was briskly rolling one stocking down past her ankle. 

Henry caught a flash of slim, shapely muscle from behind the satin of his dressing gown as she pulled the stocking free from her bare toes. The curve of a corset. Lacy, impractical frills. The thrill that raced down his spine was materially unrelated to this sight.

“Why, you brazen little hussy.”

Eliza grinned rather wolfishly for a slip of a woman who usually wore such pink-cheeked innocence. Same as the color of her dress, Henry realized at once, as she met his eyes. Her smile only widened when she saw where he had been staring. “Have you something in particular to tell me, Professor?”

“Her clean appearance belies her  _ dirty _ mind,” he replied at once, and meant it deeply.

She removed her other stocking, and merely shrugged as she placed this article onto the chair with the rest of her things: her brush, her dress, et cetera. A frisson of lust surged through his core, which made his hands tremble and his heart beat far too quickly.

“Look at yourself, Eliza,” he said, hoping to distract the woman from a persistent condition of his own creation, “bold as brass, swaggering around in my dressing gown and in my very bedroom as if you owned the damned house entire. As audacious as Cleopatra—as lion-hearted as Elizabeth—Boudicea, haranguing the Britons!”

Eliza stepped a little closer, brow furrowing slightly. “I suppose it is a great compliment in your mind, comparing a lowly flower girl to a queen.”

“You suppose,” Henry drawled, floored. “You _suppose_?! Why, you infuriating temptress! By rights I ought to show you my own spark of divine fire for further comparison! By rights I ought to take you in my arms and—!”

He blushed as red as a schoolboy before he could even finish the sentence.

“What?” asked Eliza, tilting her head to one side as if she could read every blessed thought written across Henry’s face.

He refused to be quelled by such feminine archness. “Well, I only meant to say that I should kiss you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Would you really?”

Henry felt very much like stammering, but repudiated such a pedestrian urge, and merely raised his chin in defiance. “Or rather, that a  _ real _ man might show you how a woman of such boldness ought to be kissed, as I doubt  _ Freddy Eynsford-Hill  _ imparted such knowledge during your all-too-brief engagement.”

The last sentence was meant to be a sneer, but lacked the delicious mockery it had conveyed within his mind. His hands shook something fierce, now; he was fairly certain that if he did not kiss Eliza within the next few minutes, he might go completely mad by dinnertime.

“Mrs. Pearce would box your ears at such impertinent words,” said Eliza slyly, with a glance at the open door.

“Damn Mrs. Pearce,” growled Henry, striding to close it, “damn my own impertinence, and  _ damn _ anyone else who might keep me from accomplishing such a fine and natural thing.”

When he turned around, Eliza was standing so close to him he could smell that familiar trace upon the air. His hands moved of their own accord, already bracketing her slight waist without truly touching her.

“It is rather convenient, then,” Eliza stepped forward again, “that Mrs. Pearce and the rest of the servants are at the market. And are not due back for another hour at least.”

A trace of the old accent in the turned-a of _hour_. Barely a whisper of emphasis upon the post-alveolar approximant. The professor in him ought to be furiously indignant.

“Yes.” At the moment, Henry was far more concerned with the sylph-like curve of Eliza’s neck than he was with phonetics. He wanted to run his fingertips over every centimeter of her bare skin—kiss each creamy swell and dale until it shone as pink as her lips—pink as her gauzy dress. “Quite.”

Gently, she pulled one of his hands forward, till his fingers lay flush along her lissome waist. “Aren’t you going to?”

_ “Eliza,” _ he breathed, finally understanding the purpose behind all this feminine trickery. “You devious little minx. You mean to seduce me.”

The flash of fire that passed across her face would fell a weaker man. She shoved him backwards with two hands; the movement was barely enough to make him step back, yet it delighted him to the core. “Well, I don’t stand around in my underthings for just any old brute, Henry Higgins! I want t’know what you feel when you look at me, and when you hold me, and if you’ll bloody well—”

Bending down, he pressed his mouth to hers just as he pulled her body flush against his, drawing out a slight gasp from that beautiful mouth as they embraced.

“I,” he rumbled into her ear several seconds later, brushing his lips against the delicate curve of her neck before he could stop himself, “am  not an  _ old brute _ , you  _ irrepressible _ vixen.”

“Stop bloody  _ talking _ ,” she hissed, and took his face in both hands, kissing him soundly.

**Author's Note:**

> Moi? Have an OTP Type™ and a desert-island musical? Surely you jest!
> 
> Basically, this is my fix-it fic for "a snobby English idiot and his spitfire of a girlfriend finally get their respective acts together." I'll probably come back and add a chapter 2/some actual smut to this, but figured I would post it as-is for now. (Thanks to **MasterofallImagination** for the encouragement, and thanks to Google for understanding why I have googled approximately 900 synonyms of the word "utterly.")


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